Allow configuring language for auto-generated session titles in Recents

Resolved 💬 3 comments Opened May 18, 2026 by lairulan Closed May 21, 2026

Problem

In the Claude desktop app (claude.ai/code), the "Recents" sidebar shows auto-generated session titles. For non-English users, these titles are almost always generated in English, even when:

  • The entire conversation is in the user's native language (e.g., Chinese)
  • The user's global ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md explicitly requests responses in their native language
  • The first user message is in their native language

Example from my account (all conversations were conducted in Chinese):

  • "Investigate web3 research MCP project"
  • "Compare image quality of popular AI..."
  • "Research and analyze two GitHub projects"
  • "Set up Superpowers repository"
  • "List Changsha attractions by category"

This forces non-English users to mentally translate every title when scanning Recents — a meaningful daily friction.

Why current workarounds don't work

  • CLAUDE.md is not read by the title-generation service
  • settings.json has no summaryLanguage / titleLanguage field
  • No hook can intercept title generation
  • Manually renaming each conversation is tedious

Proposed solutions (any one would help)

  1. Account-level setting: a "Session title language" dropdown in Settings (Auto / English / 中文 / 日本語 / …)
  2. Follow conversation language: have the title-generation model match the language of the first user message (lowest-effort fix — would silently solve it for everyone)
  3. Respect language field in ~/.claude/settings.json if present
  4. Read user CLAUDE.md when generating titles

Impact

This affects every non-English Claude Code user. Option 2 is probably the smallest change and would default-fix it for the whole non-English userbase.

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